The hypertextual classroom emphasizes the historically contingent nature of Cartesian ideas about space. Certainly Cartesian space and the Cartesian cosmology in general have been assaulted on any number of scientific fronts in the past several hundred years. Newtonian mechanics, Einsteinian physics, quantum theory and chaos theory have reduced Descartes's cosmology to little more than a historical oddity, at least in the eyes of modern scientists. But undergraduate students are not accomplished Einsteinian physicists or chaos theorists, and many students still cling tenaciously to certain Cartesian scientific ideas as "truths." Most students are happy to denounce some principles of Cartesian physics as absurd: the idea that the universe is full of celestial fluid, or that it contains an infinite number of strange vortices, are easily dismissed by any student with a modicum of modern scientific knowledge.[1] And yet, perhaps surprisingly, many students still hold an essentially Cartesian concept of space. Most college students learned to manipulate Cartesian X, Y and Z coordinates in their high school geometry classes; this is one obvious way in which Descartes's ideas about space have remained sacrosanct. Students too often view this Cartesian co-ordinate system not as a mathematical idea which has a history, but as something which is simply "true."
The instructor in a hypertextual classroom has a rare opportunity to challenge this attitude by situating Cartesian space firmly within its historical context. Since the 1960s, media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida have been talking about changes in our ideas of space. Computer technology radicalizes these changes in a way which seems destined to place the Cartesian universe firmly into the (Web) pages of history. McLuhan suggested in 1964 that "today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned" (3). McLuhan was speaking of the changes brought about by media such as television, but he could easily have been writing about the Internet. Derrida argued in Of Grammatology that "the end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book. . .that is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space" (86). Derrida wrote these words in 1974, when the Internet was still nothing more than an electronic bomb shelter, a byproduct of the Pentagon's desire for a computer network that could survive a nuclear war. Yet the postmodern voice has a strange prescience here, for hypertext does seem to portend the end of linear writing. Hypertext, after all, is writing which can be read nonsequentially, in an infinite variety of ways. And as Derrida suggests, this type of writing implies a new idea of space. The point which both Derrida and McLuhan seem to raise is that new kinds of writing and the growth of mass media make it hard to accept the Cartesian concept of space as a universal truth. If this was a valid point to make in 1964 or 1974, it is surely even more valid today. Today's Web surfer probably has a good intuitive understanding of "writing without the line." And the Net seems to model McLuhan's worldwide central nervous system almost perfectly. Web users are only a mouse click away from servers in Finland or Australia. Indeed, as long as the transatlantic fiber optic cables are functioning properly, the physical location of a Web server is almost entirely irrelevant to the postmodern surfer. Physical space is reduced to a two-letter abbreviation, the ".fi" or ".au" at the end of a server address.
Clearly, hypertextual networks provide us with a ready example of postmodern, non-Euclidean "space." The basic structure of these networks is very similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus as a "rhizome" (7).[2] Deleuze and Guattari suggest that any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be; they offer this unique structure as an alternative or antidote to the binary logic-tree which, they argue, has dominated Western thought and precluded a true understanding of multiplicity. Since hypertext can theoretically connect any point in a network to any other, I suggest that the Web functions as a Deleuzean rhizome. This in turn implies that the Web can easily be used to contextualize Cartesian space, removing that concept of space from the lofty pedestal of absolute truth and situating it firmly within a historical framework.
By the time they enroll in college, most students today have already heard the Internet described as a physical space by their friends, their parents and Vice President Al Gore. One speaks of "cyberspace," the "info highway," and so on. The Web itself is usually described in newspaper articles as an "area" of the Internet, as if one might take a certain "off ramp" from the "infobahn" and find oneself in this colorful electronic neighborhood. Yet as J. Hillis Miller notes, "the Internet is not a 'space,' if one means by that a Euclidean manifold in which each thing is in one place and has identifiable relations by coordinates to all other things and to the borders that define regions within the volume" (31). So here is the problematic situation which students confront in a hypertextual classroom. They "know" that space means Cartesian coordinates, points in an X-Y-Z volume. Yet at the same time, they have at their fingertips a different world, a world in which space is not something physical at all. Students are bound to find this somewhat disconcerting, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, this sensation of postmodern vertigo, this feeling of disorientation, is the first sign that students have begun to move beyond what they are sure they "know" about Cartesian space. They are perhaps now ready to think about Cartesian space in a historical way.
1For a good description of Cartesian cosmology, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: an Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
2See also Rob Shields, "Introduction: Virtual Spaces," in Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Ed. Rob Shields. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996, p. 9.